The Execution of Louis XVI
On the cold, foggy morning of January 21, 1793 French King Louis XVI
made the hour and a half journey through the city of Paris from the fortified
medieval monastery where he was imprisoned, to the Place de la Révolution, where the
scaffold for his execution awaited him.
The Paris Commune, the revolutionary municipal government, had stationed guards four deep
along the coach's path, and the journey passed mostly in silence as Louis prayed.
By 10 am, Louis’ coach arrived peacefully at the Place de la Révolution, where some
twenty thousand people had gathered.
The coach approached the scaffold Louis dismounted the carriage and removed his coat and collar.
The executioners bound his hands, led him up the stairs, and cut his hair.
Louis addressed the crowd in a clear voice, “I die innocent.
I pardon my enemies and I hope that my blood will be useful to the French, that it will
appease God’s anger...”
At this point, the drums began to roll, and Louis’ final words were inaudible.
He was strapped to a plank, guided through the guillotine’s “widow's window,” and
was executed.
The execution of the king by his people was a transformative moment in European politics.
Cries of “Long live the Republic” rang out.
The crowd began to sing La Marseillaise, the song the soldiers of the Federated National
Guard had brought with them to Paris the previous year.
Some of those gathered pressed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of the
king, which they kept as grisly souvenirs.
All efforts were made to ensure that there would be nothing left of the king.
Louis’ head and body were taken swiftly to the Madeleine Cemetery where he was buried
in a deep grave in a wooden coffin, which was covered in quicklime to accelerate the
decomposition process, and quickly covered over.
How, we should ask, had the French Revolution arrived at this moment?
How did it become possible for the French to try and then to execute their beloved father,
their king?
After all, when the Revolution began just a few years before in 1789, no one could imagine
a France without the king.
The deputies of the National Assembly had advocated a constitutional monarchy, which
they instituted in 1791.
Critiques of Louis under the Old Regime and in the early years of the Revolution tended
to portray him as a good king who was just poorly advised.
Historians generally agree that Louis XVI was reform-minded and earnestly wanted the
best for his people.
But the king quickly grew dissatisfied with the constraints of a Constitutional Monarchy.
In June 1791, he tried to escape Paris and flee to the Austrian Netherlands,
where he could mount a resistance to the Revolution.
Louis and his family very nearly made it, but they were recognized and arrested in the
town of Varennes and escorted back to Paris by six thousand national guardsmen.
As they made their way back to Paris, entire villages of armed men, women and children
came out to meet the procession, to cheer the nation and harangue the king.
The flight to Varennes marked a turning point.
The king had tried to abandon his people.
Worse yet, Louis had left behind a letter in which he renounced the Revolution and claimed
that all of his previous support for revolutionary legislation had been made under duress.
He had lied; he had broken faith with his people.
The shift in public opinion was swift.
Newspapers of a range of political positions critiqued and lampooned the king.
Louis’ name, image, and insignias were removed from public view, like shop signs, inns, and
other public buildings.
And the first sustained talk of a republic echoed through Paris in the weeks after the king’s
attempted flight.
The situation of the king deteriorated the following year.
In the summer of 1792, France was at war with Austria and Prussia, who were advancing swiftly
into French territory.
In August, the people of Paris and the national guardsmen began an insurrection, and Louis
and his family were forced to flee the Tuileries Palace and seek the protection of the Legislative Assembly.
With Louis in their hands, the Assembly initiated a thorough and deliberate legal proceeding against the
king, charging him with “a multitude of crimes to establish [his] tyranny,” including treason and counterrevolutionary activity.
Shortly before the trial began in December, more documents from a safe in the Tuileries
palace were uncovered.
The 625 documents provided evidence of Louis’ efforts over the past
three years to destroy the Revolution: instructions for his ministers to lie to the Legislative
Assembly, attempts to bribe deputies, and efforts to obstruct the constitution all appeared
in the king's own hand.
Following the state’s case and the king’s defense, the deputies prepared to vote on
three questions: first, was the king guilty? second, what should his punishment be? and third should the
punishment be put to a national referendum before it was carried out?
On January 15, 693 of the 745 deputies voted “yes” that the king was guilty.
The deputies voted next on whether the punishment should be put to a national appeal, and 424
deputies voted against the appeal.
The vote on the king’s death took place on January 16th, and the vote stretched late
into the night and the following day.
Three hundred and sixty-one votes were needed for a simple majority and in the end 361 deputies
voted unconditionally for death.
The deputies entertained a series of appeals in the days following, but the measures to
stay the king's execution failed.
On January 20, 1793, the deputies decreed Louis’ guilt and his punishment by death;
there would be no reprieve of his execution.
The following day, the sentence against Louis was carried out.
How has Louis and his bloody fate been remembered? In the years following Louis’ execution,
the anniversary of his death was not celebrated.
All but the most rudimentary facts of the king’s execution were omitted from the official
record of the event.
The memory of Louis was kept only by forces outside the French Republic.
For instance, on June 17, 1793, the Catholic Church declared Louis XVI a “royal martyr.”
Public celebrations in memory of Louis only returned to France when his younger brother
retook the throne in 1814.
On January 19, 1815, the king's remains were exhumed and taken by convoy to the family
crypt at the Saint-Denis cathedral where all but three French kings were buried.
The anniversary of Louis’ death was made a national day of mourning.
At such memorial services, Louis’ will and testament was read aloud from the pulpit,
sometimes instead of a sermon.
These official celebrations lasted until the end of the Restoration period in 1830.
Under subsequent governments, individual French men and women were still free to mark the
occasion of Louis’ death, though since the Second World War, such events have not been
very popular beyond the small circle of monarchists in France.
Today, a requiem mass or memorial service for Louis is celebrated in many French cities
and towns in the weeks surrounding January 21st, often at the request of local royalist societies.
The rather minimal support for memorials to Louis is a reminder of how incongruous the
memory of the king is with the French republican identity today.
And it is a reminder of just how much the political structures of Europe have changed
since that fateful execution day.